As a teacher, we are often faced with the conundrum of bringing a real-life experience to classrooms in a way that is realistic and identifiable for students. As our commerce students will soon be faced with real life decision-makings situations concerning costs, profitability, HR and strategy, we decided to adopt an innovative approach and run a simulation with them to expose them to the 21st century skills of critical thinking, media literacy, initiative, leadership, collaboration and adaptability.
The Commerce Department, in an innovative extension of classroom teaching, decided to run a “Coffee Shop Inc.” simulation, a prize- winning simulation, by Harvard Business Impact. As part of this simulation, the students went through play with increasing complexity and tested their management skills. The students were given the task to manage and grow their own coffee shop business in the face of a changing external environment and competitive landscape. In Level 1 the students choose a location for their store, determine their strategy, and make marketing, human resources, and operations decisions. The simulation scaled up to building the brand, wherein the students faced an additional complexity with decisions on staffing and in-house coffee roasting. The last level saw the coffee shop going international, with students developing a global chain of coffee shops in mature and emerging markets by opening owned and franchised stores. Within each type of market, the students needed to make decisions around vertical integrations, the number of new stores, marketing, and human resources.
Interestingly and authentically, (and just like the real world operates-with no cookie cutter solutions), the students could succeed with different strategies, as long as the decisions were in sync with the chosen strategy and aligned to the company’s target group and to the changing environmental and competitive conditions. The students applied key business concepts and tools (e.g. PESTLE analysis, competitive analysis, product differentiation, vertical integration) to improve performance.
With this simulation, the classroom turned into a forceful collection of young turks, making important decisions. The students suddenly found abstract textbook concepts becoming real, with the outcomes of their decisions visible on their laptop screens. The environment of the classroom was vibrant, with students debating and defending strategies, making mistakes, course correcting and then feeling the joy of positive outcomes of their course corrections (or the jaw-clenching determination to get it right in the next round if course corrections failed!).
Several students remarked that this was the first time they felt the “real world” of business decisions pressing on them — a glimpse of what lies beyond the classroom.
The key take-away from this exercise would be that innovation in teaching is about storytelling and bringing real world experiences into the classroom, in a way that students will remember the lessons long after the 40 minutes class is over.
By Hema Narula,
Commerce Dept
